每日简报

用于因果推断的可控生成式沙盒AI 解读

Method validation and study design in causal inference rely on synthetic data with known counterfactuals. Existing simulators trade off distributional realism, the ability to capture mixed-type and multimodal tabular data, against causal controllability, including explicit control over overlap, unmeasured confounding, and treatment effect heterogeneity. We introduce CausalMix, a variational generative framework that closes this gap by coupling a mixture of Gaussian latent…

示证型实验AI 解读

Adaptive experiments are used extensively in online platforms, healthcare and biotechnology, and the social sciences. Often, the primary goal is not to precisely estimate a treatment effect but to demonstrate that at least one candidate intervention yields a positive effect, for some subpopulation and on some measured outcome. We formalize this objective as testing the global null in a threshold bandit framework, and develop two inference procedures that are valid under…

利用最佳顺序得分搜索学习时间序列因果结构AI 解读

Causal structure learning from observational data is central to many scientific and policy domains, but the time series setting common to many disciplines poses several challenges due to temporal dependence. In this paper we focus on score-based causal discovery for multivariate time series and introduce TS-BOSS, a time series extension of the recently proposed Best Order Score Search (BOSS) (Andrews et al. 2023). TS-BOSS performs a permutation-based search over dynamic…

垄断竞争下利用收入数据识别和估计生产函数与消费者需求AI 解读

We establish nonparametric identification of production functions, total factor productivity (TFP), price markups, and firms' output prices and quantities, as well as consumer demand, using firm-level revenue data, without observing output quantity, in a monopolistically competitive environment with a fully nonparametric demand system. This result overturns the widely held view -- formalized by Bond, Hashemi, Kaplan, and Zoch (2021) -- that output elasticities and markups…

拓扑因果效应AI 解读

Estimating causal effects is particularly challenging when outcomes arise in complex, non-Euclidean spaces, where conventional methods often fail to capture meaningful structural variation. We develop a framework for topological causal inference that defines treatment effects through differences in the topological structure of potential outcomes, summarized by power-weighted silhouette functions of persistence diagrams. We develop an efficient, doubly robust estimator in a…

从观察数据估计广告视觉属性效应：生成图像辅助的双重机器学习AI 解读

Digital advertising increasingly relies on visual content, yet marketers lack rigorous methods for understanding how specific visual attributes causally affect consumer engagement. This paper addresses a fundamental methodological challenge: estimating causal effects when the treatment, such as a model's skin tone, is an attribute embedded within the image itself. Standard approaches like Double Machine Learning (DML) fail in this setting because vision encoders entangle…

回归不连续设计中直接估计条件平均处理效应的贝叶斯加性回归树AI 解读

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used for causal inference. In many empirical applications, treatment effects vary substantially with covariates, and ignoring such heterogeneity can lead to misleading conclusions, which motivates flexible modeling of heterogeneous treatment effects in RDD. To this end, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric approach to estimating heterogeneous treatment effects based on Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART). The key feature…

从大语言模型中提取因果关系假说AI 解读

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on enormous amounts of data and encode knowledge in their parameters. We propose a pipeline to elicit causal relationships from LLMs. Specifically, (i) we sample many documents from LLMs on a given topic, (ii) we extract an event list from from each document, (iii) we group events that appear across documents into canonical events, (iv) we construct a binary indicator vector for each document over canonical events, and (v) we estimate…

利用外部对照开展试验近端学习：HIV 预防案例AI 解读

With the advent of effective pre-exposure prophylaxis agents, active-controlled HIV prevention trials have become a common study design. Nevertheless, estimating absolute efficacy relative to a placebo remains important. In this paper, we introduce a novel application of proximal causal inference methods to estimate the counterfactual cumulative HIV incidence under placebo for participants in an active-controlled trial of cabotegravir, using external control data from a…

纵向队列完全依从性因果效应：逆概率治疗加权与 G 估计比较AI 解读

Medication adherence is essential to ensure treatment effectiveness, but too often in routine care non-adherence compromises the desired outcome. We explore longitudinal causal modelling using observational data to estimate the time-varying effects of continuous drug adherence measures on health outcomes over a sustained period. The goal of such analyses is to quantify the potential impact of interventions to improve adherence on long-term health. We consider two established…

整合随机实验中的异质信息：统一校准框架AI 解读

In modern randomized experiments, large-scale data collection increasingly yields rich baseline covariates and auxiliary information from multiple sources. Such information offers opportunities for more precise treatment effect estimation, but it also raises the challenge of integrating heterogeneous information coherently without compromising validity. Covariate-adaptive randomization (CAR) is widely used to improve covariate balance at the design stage, but it typically…

诱导次序统计量的收敛速率及其应用AI 解读

Induced order statistics (IOS) arise when sample units are reordered according to the value of an auxiliary variable, and the associated responses are analyzed in that induced order. IOS play a central role in applications where the goal is to approximate the conditional distribution of an outcome at a fixed covariate value using observations whose covariates lie closest to that point, including regression discontinuity designs, k-nearest-neighbor methods, and…

支持集与矩限制下不完全模型的识别和反事实分析AI 解读

This paper develops a unified identification framework for counterfactual analysis in incomplete models characterized by support and moment restrictions. I demonstrate that identifying structural parameters and conducting counterfactual analyses are isomorphic tasks. By embedding counterfactual restrictions within an augmented structural model specification, this approach bypasses the conventional "estimate-then-simulate" workflow and the need to simulate outcomes from…

内生性检验：基于矩条件的贝叶斯方法AI 解读

A standard assumption in the Bayesian estimation of linear regression models is that the regressors are exogenous in the sense that they are uncorrelated with the model error term. In practice, however, this assumption can be invalid. In this paper, using the exponentially tilted empirical likelihood framework, we develop a Bayes factor test for endogeneity that compares a base model that is correctly specified under exogeneity but misspecified under endogeneity against an…

因果发现应拥抱群体智慧AI 解读

This paper argues for recognizing an emerging paradigm of causal learning by wisdom of the crowd. Recent developments in government, industry, and research point to the rise of decentralized and crowd-based approaches within causal modeling, where causal knowledge distributed across many contributors can be systematically elicited and integrated with causal learning workflows. In this paradigm, causal learning becomes a distributed decision-making problem: each participant…

TEA-Time：跨时间迁移处理效应AI 解读

Treatment effects estimated from a randomized controlled trial are local not only to the study population but also to the time at which the trial was conducted. The literature on generalizing experimental findings to new populations is extensive, yet transporting effects across time has received far less attention, and even defining the target estimand is nonobvious. We formalize the transported average treatment effect under a separable temporal effects assumption, derive…

处理效应完全中介与因果机制可识别性的检验AI 解读

In causal analysis, understanding the causal mechanisms through which an intervention or treatment affects an outcome is often of central interest. We propose a test to evaluate (i) whether the causal effect of a treatment that is randomly assigned conditional on covariates is fully mediated by, or operates exclusively through, observed intermediate outcomes (referred to as mediators or surrogate outcomes), and (ii) whether the various causal mechanisms operating through…

静态支付意愿何时产生误导？动态特征价值评估框架AI 解读

Many policy counterfactuals depend on how consumers value product attributes such as sugar, caffeine, alcohol, or emissions. Standard hedonic and differentiated-products models typically impose time-separable preferences. But when attributes are habit forming, current consumption can shift future marginal valuations, so static willingness-to-pay may be insufficient for policy counterfactuals. I develop a nonparametric revealed-preference framework for dynamic hedonic…

通过状态空间边际化高效进行动态结构方程模型的贝叶斯估计AI 解读

Dynamic structural equation models (DSEMs) combine time-series modeling of within-person processes with hierarchical modeling of between-person differences and differences between timepoints, and have become very popular for the analysis of intensive longitudinal data in the social sciences. An important computational bottleneck has, however, still not been resolved: whenever the underlying process is assumed to be latent and measured by one or more indicators per timepoint,…

时变协变量下交错双重差分处理效应的双重稳健估计AI 解读

With staggered adoption, difference-in-differences (DiD) analyses define the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) at the group-period level and aggregate it into groupwise, periodwise, dynamic, and overall effects. We study a period-by-period version of conditional parallel trends, with covariates unaffected by treatment while allowing covariates to shift the trends in untreated potential outcomes. We propose an augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW)…

因果可解释性的估计与推断AI 解读

Understanding how much each variable contributes to an outcome is a central question across disciplines. A causal view of explainability is favorable for its ability in uncovering underlying mechanisms and generalizing to new contexts. Based on a family of causal explainability quantities, we develop methods for their estimation and inference. In particular, we construct a one-step correction estimator using semi-parametric efficiency theory, which explicitly leverages the…

含交互固定效应的线性多维回归AI 解读

This paper studies a linear model for multidimensional panel data of three or more dimensions with unobserved interactive fixed-effects. The main estimator uses a Neyman-orthogonal approach, and requires two preliminary steps. First, the model is embedded within a two-dimensional panel framework where factor model methods in Bai (2009) lead to consistent, but slowly converging, estimates. The second step develops a weighted-within transformation that is robust to…

算法干扰下的治疗效应估计：结构化神经网络方法AI 解读

Online user-generated content platforms allocate billions of dollars of promotional traffic through algorithms in two-sided marketplaces. To evaluate updates to these algorithms, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized experiments. However, because treated and control creators compete for exposure, such experiments suffer from algorithmic interference: exposure outcomes depend on competitors' treatment status. We show that commonly used difference-in-means…

函数型平均治疗效应的双重稳健估计AI 解读

Understanding causal relationships in the presence of complex, structured data remains a central challenge in modern statistics and science in general. While traditional causal inference methods are well-suited for scalar outcomes, many scientific applications demand tools capable of handling functional data -- outcomes observed as functions over continuous domains such as time or space. Motivated by this need, we propose DR-FoS, a novel method for estimating the Functional…